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Intervention – featuring Tegan and Sara

8.9.20108.9.2010

I went from Fez, the dusky 9th century city in the ancient kingdom of Morocco, to modern, sparklingly jeweled Vancouver in bright bright British Columbia, continuously flying and laying over and flying again for nearly 36 hours to make my recording session with Tegan and Sara, nursing slowly dying intestinal parasites along the way. It was a long journey, but I couldn’t sleep at all, because I was so excited that I was going to be hanging out with Tegan and Sara and their extended family, both biological and rock, for two days. I have been a rabid longtime fan of their music, and had even got to meet Sara once backstage at a show of mine in Montreal years ago. “The Con” is the song I go to when there is nowhere else to turn, when I have exhausted all my auditory options and I am all “a million hours left to think of you and think of that.”

I love going to see them live too. Tegan and Sara play for thousands of fans every night and they make their fans feel like they are important, that they exist, that queers and girls can be rock stars too, that it’s about them and about their lives and about the guitars and as they are defined by the music, they are made real in the world. Tegan and Sara make more than music. They make a whole generation of queers and girls feel like they matter. It’s powerful and profound. When I look out into the crowd at a Tegan and Sara show, I feel a kind of elation, like together, in the music, we can do anything. It’s the way rock and roll makes us invincible. With Tegan and Sara we can overcome anything – homophobia, sexism, even heartbreak. I love them. I love them so fucking much.

Photo by Lindsey Byrnes

I couldn’t have been more excited to be working with them in the studio, after several months of juggling our mutually hectic schedules and finding time to make the song that perfectly opens up this record, “Intervention”. It’s the first track on the album because it’s the first one I want everyone to hear. It’s so hilarious but also deeply sympathetic and truthful and also, just fucking rocks. Incidentally, the lyrics were not written to satisfy my own obsessive relationship to the television show “Intervention,” as the culture of addiction and recovery has fascinated me way before reality TV was a thing, but I dig the show. I still can’t believe the alcoholics and addicts featured don’t figure out right away that they are on “Intervention” and that there’s going to be one soon. They must be really fucked up. And I must be really fucked up because often I find myself slightly jealous of the people on the program because they seem like they are having a good time, at least before they get all intervened upon. That is where my jealousy ends. I think having to have an actual intervention would be a true nightmare, and so writing the words to the song were a kind of prayer, a mantra against it ever actually happening to me.